Research stream 3

RS3: National context: Migration governance in non-Western, non-democratic migration locales examines the interplay between (a) immigration laws and policies and (b) migrants’ experiences in non-Western, non-democratic migration locales. The analysis of these processes requires us to adopt to a context-sensitive approach due to the fact that many non-Western migrant-receiving countries are nondemocratic, lack a rule of law, have a large informal economy and are plagued by systemic corruption. In such nondemocratic migration regimes, migration governance processes are largely shaped by informal power structures and extralegal negotiations that take place in multiple social arenas, leading to different outcomes and unintended consequences. This implies that, even if we conduct a thorough investigation of the formal migration policies and laws, our analysis may not reflect actual de facto circumstances. Given the gap between government immigration policy and actual immigration outcomes, efforts aiming to compare migration regimes may benefit further from focusing on migrants’ agency and migration outcomes than on migration outputs (laws and policies). Hence, focusing on migration outcomes may prove more fruitful when comparing different migration regimes given that outcomes reflect what actually happens “on the ground”—that is, the reality as experienced by migrants. This is especially true in the context of nondemocratic regimes, where policies and laws are poorly implemented or implemented in ways that often contradict their original aims and spirit. Based on these considerations, the goal of RS3 is to comparatively investigate non-democratic migration locales through the ethnographic study of migrant workers’ daily experiences of immigration laws, policies and state and non-state actors involved in the chain of migration. The use of an ethnographic approach will allow us to understand the peculiarities and recurring patterns in migration governance in non-Western migration contexts vis-à-vis the prevailing tendencies in the traditional Western countries of immigration.